"Dave also talked about how content is king and how he's seen examples of sites ranking well for competitive queries on the strength of quality content ALONE without any links to speak of to back up the rankings."

I'd love to see those examples. Content is king because it attracts links and repeat visits, and is the very essance of a great website.

Of course, if you place new content on a website with a history of providing great content, then it'll show up for competitive queries based on the trust the site has gathered in the past.

However, if I throw up a blog tonight and write a killer article about "mortgages" or "car insurance", it could be absolutely groundbreaking and it still wouldn't stand a chance of showing up until it got some links pointing toward it.

Good to hear someone else getting as frustrated by this whole PR malarky as I do. The recent drop just goes to show what an arguably worse than useless measure it is - it serves only to make site owners jittery and give us a hard time about their dropping "ranking" (even when traffic and postitions remain the same). I sometimes wonder if it's just Google's special way of giving a nice little "f*ck you" to all us SEOs.

I still find it crazy that Google and MSN/Live are even mentioned in the same sentence nowadays. I can't imagine anyone would be too fussed about actually taking the time to optimise their traffic for Live - it's nice to have but it's not going to be a business breaker either way. Yahoo can be a little frustrating sometimes but, really, so long as Google is doing well then it's all good. The other 2 are the icing on an already tasty cake.

Hi Rand... I have to put a paid links question your way, as it's a bit of a bug bear of mine (and I know I'm not alone). Lots of SEOs seem to have succumbed to what Jim Boykin calls the "blue koolaid", and there are other SEOs who know full well that paid links work but are happy to purpetuate the myth that they'll destroy your rankings as it's not a technique that they're willing to employ. I'm not going to ask you outright if you use them (hello Mr Cutts!) but my question is;

Do you think it is possible to rank for *competitive* search terms using only freely acquired links? If so, where would be your top spots for getting the best free links?

Absolutely, Pete. Most content on most corporate websites is pure marketing waffle, cynically written to sound good and express the best qualities of the product or service on offer, rather than offer an accurate review of it. It's usually pretty disingenuous and is rarely the kind of content that attracts links, hence the need for "linkbait" in the first place. That's really why I commented originally, because I also recognise the difficulty in getting most corporate clients to depart from this promotional writing style for some of their content so that it might be "linkable" to others, while still conveying the company message and/or philosophy. However, I don't see the process of writing to sell a website (the essence of linkbait - convince the user that the site is worth linking to/digging) as being any less cynical then the process of writing to sell a product or service. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, it's just the way I see it.

I see what you're saying, but did your Beginner's Guide become linkbait by virtue of the fact that it was linked to, or was it originally posted with this in mind? I'd like to think that it was posted as a useful aid to new SEOs first and foremost, and any links gained from it were simply a bonus. If I post a good article tomorrow purely for the sake of posting a good article for people to read, but it has the side effect of attracting a lot of links, would it then become link bait? Or should I have had the intention of gaining a lot of links from the piece from the start, and engineered it accordingly?

This is what I mean by cynical - if any thought whatsoever has been put into how a piece of content can be made more "linkable", or if, indeed, the piece has been written with that sole purpose in mind, that comes across to me as much more cynical than a piece that was written purely for the love of the subject matter.

But when does "useful content" become "linkbait"? I blogged about this recently, and came to the conclusion that it's really just a more cynical, deliberate version of the same thing. Obviously, the higher the quality of the content on your website, the more links it will attract, but linkbait is something else - just by labelling it that you're putting the emphasis on the amount of links it will attract before anything else. I look forward to watching this blog when I get in from work because I've often wondered about this very issue.

Hamlet, I read your blog for the first time today and thought of this post straight away, it's a great example of how you can muscle in on the action so long as you've got something relevant, interesting and unique to say. Also very impressive considering English is not your first language!

While you've referred to an example of a good article from a relatively unknown blog, i think what places SEOmoz, Stundbl and SEObook and the rest of the "A-List" above the crowd is the consistency with which deliver useful information. With SEOmoz and SEObook, for example, I know there's going to be something new every day for me to check out, and this keeps me coming back.